SUMMER OF SATAN: Exorcismus: The Possession of Emma Evans

Marred only by an unwieldy title and a final act lapse into melodrama, Manuel Carballo’s UK-set chiller is an often compelling retread of ‘The Exorcist’ that benefits from an excellent performance by Sophie Vavasseur as the eponymous Emma. A 15-year-old prone to mood swings, Emma is resentful of her well-meaning but overbearing parents’ insistence on home-schooling her. After a row over whether she can attend a concert with some friends, Emma has some kind of fit. At hospital, a barrage of tests return negative. Parents John (Richard Felix) and Lucy (Jo-Anne Stockham) are perplexed. Lucy’s brother Christopher (Stephen Billington), a Catholic priest, visits her and promises, “God will not let anything bad happen to you.”

Carballo spends the first third of ‘Exorcismus’ (yes, I know it’s the Latin word for “exorcism” but it’s still a piss-awful title) establishing the dynamics of the family – the frosty relationship between John and Lucy, the favouritism exhibited to their younger child, Lucy’s lapsed Catholicism compared to the strength of her brother’s faith, and Christopher’s discrediting over his part in a failed exorcism – as well as probing Emma’s troubled state of mind: self-harm, recreational drug use, a sexual attraction to her worldly-wise cousin Alex (Tommy Bastow).

Emma’s behaviour grows unpredictable: she alienates friends, terrifies her brother and can’t remember anything of what’s happened at the end of each successive episode. Her parents insist on a psychologist. When said individual keels over from a heart attack after trying to hypnotize Emma, she realizes that something is very wrong and reaches out to Christopher for help. Despite John and Lucy’s initial antipathy, he arranges to carry out an exorcism, stipulating that he must record the proceedings for evidence since he’s acting without the permission of the diocese.

At this point, I groaned inwardly at the prospect of yet another low-budget “found footage” horror movie. Mercifully, very little of Christopher’s camcorder footage is featured, and what little appears on screen does so in the furtherance of a real kicker of a twist. ‘Exorcismus’, scripted by David Muñoz (writer of del Toro’s ‘The Devil’s Backbone’), achieves an audacious sleight of hand, suckering its audience by dint of familiarity with ‘The Exorcist’. The story beats follow the expected pattern: teenage girl (check) from an affluent family (check) who has dabbled with a ouija board (check) and starts acting out of character (check), as well as levitating (check) and projectile vomiting (check) but which she’s subjected to medical tests (check) and hypnosis (check) the doctors to draw a blank (check) and it’s left to a priest with a chequered past (check) to officiate at an exorcism (check). There’s even a scene where Christopher admits that he’s been over-confident in thinking he can tackle the demon by himself and sends word to his elder and mentor Monsignor Ennis (Douglas Bradley) to assist him.

I’d already pegged ‘Exorcismus’ as utterly derivative (albeit intelligently handled) and greeted this narrative development with a certain salacious curiosity: Pinhead himself on the side of the angels, wielding a crucifix and casting out demons. I cracked open another beer and settled back for the grand finale. Then Carballo and Muñoz sent a curveball arcing my way. In a film that carries no hint of a twist in the tale – and could have followed its anticipated course and still been effective – it makes a sudden divergence from audience expectations, resulting in a switcheroo that, conceptually at least, is a hell of a lot better than the rug-pull of, say, ‘The Last Exorcism’.

I say “conceptually” because the execution is a tad clumsy. Nonetheless, the territory into which Carballo steers the last act is bold, challenging (perhaps, to some, infuriating) and ballsy. He’s aided by a cool quasi-documentary aesthetic that breaks out the SFX work only very sparingly. Vavasseur, just 18 at the time of filming, is pitch perfect, conjuring teenage angst and demonic persecution with equal conviction. The early scenes of her possession, the actress suggesting just through her eyes and her vocal inflections the awakening of something dark and evil and centuries old within her, are properly unsettling – proof that viscera and geysers of crimson will always be secondary to character, context and narrative development when it comes to creeping out your audience.

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MASTERS OF HORROR: Jenifer and Pelts

Continuing the Dario Argento love from yesterday’s entry, I thought I’d take a look at the two episodes he directed for ‘Masters of Horror’.

‘Jenifer’ – a title I find strangely unfinished in its only-one-“n” spelling – was the fourth episode of season one. Adapted from a Bruce Jones short story by Steven Weber, who also plays the lead role, the basic set-up is that world-weary cop Frank Spivey (Weber) shoots a cleaver-wielding and crazy-looking guy who is about to despatch a facially disfigured young woman – the Jenifer (Carrie Anne Fleming) of the title. He has a hard time adjusting to the aftermath of his first fatal shooting and quarrels with his well-meaning wife and his moody teenage son. Distraught that Jenifer has been taken to a psychiatric institution, he insists on moving her into the family home, a decision that precipitates his family’s acrimonious departure.

As well as being disfigured, Jenifer is incapable of speech. At best, she whimpers or lets loose a throaty growl. She expresses herself emotionally with the pitiful nuzzling and licking of a pet; and physically with the sexual urges of a nymphomaniac who’s been mainlining oysters, ginseng and Spanish fly. A mutually dependent relationship develops between Frank and Jenifer, but when he discovers the true extent of her animalism, he installs her in a rickety cabin in the woods in the misguided hope that no further unpleasantness will ensue.

Did I say “unpleasantness”? The make-up department make a repulsively good job of turning Fleming (a woman who doesn’t even reside in the same hemisphere as the ugly stick – do a Google image search if you need proof) into a grotesque she-beast … albeit a grotesque she-beast with the body of a centrefold. Argento plays up the psycho-sexual elements to the hilt, as well as emphasizing the “beast in man” (or in this case woman) subtext with maximum visceral impact. Before the halfway mark, there’s a set-your-teeth-on-edge sex scene that takes its pointers from the crude old adage about not looking at the hearth when you’re poking the fire, followed by a bit of woman-on-feline violence that gives a whole new meaning to “cat food”.

The second half of ‘Jenifer’, with Frank off the force, sans family and relocated to the aforementioned cabin, sets up a potential dynamic when our increasingly troubled hero meets sympathetic local shop owner Rose (Cynthia Garris), only to resolve with an ironic circularity. While the means by which Argento and Weber arrive at the payoff might confound expectations, the twist itself is as easy to see coming as an ocean liner on a duckpond, establishing ‘Jenifer’ as an x-rated episode of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, but no less perversely entertaining for all that.

‘Pelts’ – episode six of season two – seems, in its first quarter of an hour, to be setting up two stories: that of Jeb Jameson (John Saxon) inculcating his son Larry (Michael Suchanek) into the ancient and ignoble art of laying traps for small unsuspecting furry animals whose pelts are a saleable commodity; and that of Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf), an ill-tempered furrier who bullies the ethnic workers in his sweatshop and lusts after exotic dancer Shanna (Ellen Ewusie), the star attraction at a strip-joint he frequents.

Then Argento curtails the Jeb/Larry subplot in notably gory fashion and shifts the focus to Jake. If ‘Jenifer’ is an x-rated ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ episode, then ‘Pelts’ is an x-rated M.R. James tale. As James made the artefacts which his unerringly academic protagonists came into contact with the receptacles of some nameless and inexplicable evil, so ‘Pelts’ gives us raccoon fur as a purveyor of something unnatural, unholy and more or less unexplained (there’s a scene which hints at the provenance of the ground the raccoons inhabit, but for the most part Argento is content to leave it to the audience’s imagination; this is one of the smartest things a horror writer or director can do), the difference being that M.R. James would never have had one of his mild-mannered intellectuals angling for a lap-dance from a curvaceous stripper.

Essentially, ‘Pelts’ unfolds as an hour-long PETA commercial where the idea of having famous actresses declare that they’d rather go naked than wear fur is taken to a whole different level. It doesn’t work its way sneakily towards the spelled-out-in-flashing-neon denouement of ‘Jenifer’, although there is a sneaky bit of foreshadowing early on. There is also a lot more in the way of dark humour in ‘Pelts’. In fact, it’s one of the few Argento titles I can think of which trades on graveyard humour. I’d be hard pressed to say which is the better of these two episodes.

Taken together, though, these two hours of television add up to the best thing Argento has put his name to in the last decade. Both play wryly on his earlier work: ‘Jenifer’ features a recurring child-like musical cue that recalls the nursery rhyme in ‘Deep Red’, plus the ‘Stendahl Syndrome’-like riverside death of an antagonist; while ‘Pelts’ evokes ‘Opera’ in a shot of an eye nervously squaring up to a peephole and a jarringly weird moment where the camera seems to burrow into a bug-infested bit of grassland, homages both ‘Cat o’ Nine Tails’ and ‘Deep Red’ in an extended elevator/pool of blood set-piece, throws in a cackling old hag who comes across as a hillbilly second cousin to the Three Mothers, and suggests ‘Suspiria’ in the décor of Shanna’s garish apartment.

The acting performances are generally very good, with Meat Loaf giving an early indication of his reality TV stand-off with Gary Busey in ‘Pelts’ and Fleming, in ‘Jenifer’, playing the half-tragic-half-monstrous anti-heroine in a bravura turn that ranges from vulnerable to predatory by way of coquettish and aggressively erotic – and all without uttering a single coherent word. It’s a powerhouse bit of acting that makes me wonder why Fleming isn’t headlining movies right now.

I’ve seen barely any ‘Masters of Horror’ episodes outside of these two – John Carpenter’s ‘Cigarette Burns’ and Takeshi Miike’s gruelling ‘Imprint’ being the honourable exceptions – but on the available evidence, I doubt there’s much else from either season that reaches these heights.

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Dario Argento

Happy 71st birthday to Dario Argento. I’m assuming the knife is purely for cake-cutting duties.

Here’s a large glass raised to you, sir, and what say we forego “Happy Birthday To You” in favour of this little number?

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The Battle of Algiers

The Nottingham Contemporary, an art gallery that’s more than just an art gallery (they also host lectures, reading groups, workshops and film screenings) and whose doors are open free of charge, are currently curating an exhibition of responses by various artists to the life and work of Jean Genet. Genet spent his early life in and out of prison and, as a repeat offender, was looking at spending pretty much the rest of his life behind bars but the intervention of the French intellectuals of the day, spearheaded by Sartre, secured a pardon and established him as one of the nation’s most important literary figures. Sartre was so impressed by Genet’s work that he wrote a 700-page biography of him entitled ‘Saint Genet’. Some people’s egos would be swelled by this. It had the opposite effect on Genet. He suffered a bout of writer’s block that lasted almost a decade. By the time he started writing again, his work was shot through with the aesthetic of his political activism.

How political was Genet? How much of a thorn in the side of the establishment? Well, his essay ‘Four Hours in Shatila’ – a description of the aftermath of the massacre at the titular Palestinian camp – is one of the great pieces of political writing … and its greatness is due to its humanity. Also – and I think this observation answers both questions emphatically – he was a white guy who was feted by the Black Panthers.

The Nottingham Contemporary’s exhibition is in two sections, the latter dealing with Genet’s activism. It’s on for another month (until 2nd October) and is worth checking out for the Black Panther memorabilia and some potent artworks inspired by the movement (the murals by Emory Douglas are frankly awesome). It was to tie in with this aspect of the exhibition, and in keeping with Genet’s empathy with the oppressed and the dispossessed, that the Nottingham Contemporary held a free screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘The Battle of Algiers’.

Small confession: I’d never seen it before. One of those gaps in my film-going experience that was an inexplicable as it was embarrassing. Well, last Thursday I plugged the gap, I saw a masterpiece of world cinema, my first acquaintance with it was on the big screen, and it didn’t cost me a penny. (If that’s not a win-win situation, I don’t know what is.) The cherry on top was an informative introduction by Mathilde von Bulow, lecturer in 20th century international history at the University of Nottingham. As the opening credits rolled, I was thankful for the background knowledge, my understanding of the French/Algerian issue being probably one percentile above zero.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Pontecorvo breaks it down real simple: French colonialists = oppressors; Algerian muslims = oppressed. And yet Pontecorvo refuses to take the easy route and make it a tub-thumping propaganda piece. Negative consequences are shown on both sides. Acts of utter brutality are shown on both sides. Acts of humanity are present and correct, too. As much as the French colonialists (represented first by the police and then the army) are indisputably the villains of the piece, so too are the Algerian FLN freedom fighters depicted as frenziedly mowing down civilians and planting bombs in non-authoritarian/military areas such as nightclubs, bars and airports. A particularly touching scene, effective for not trying to play on the audience’s emotions, has a young Algerian boy rescued by a French police officer after an angry mob try to lynch him following a bombing he clearly had nothing to do with.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The production of the film merits discussion. In 1962, ‘Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger’ was published – a memoir by FLN leading light Saadi Yacef written while he was a prisoner of the French. Post-independence, and now a member of the new Algerian government, Yacef found himself fulfilling the unlikely role of film producer. Gillo Pontecorvo was a member of the Italian Communist Party, a dedicated anti-fascist and led the Resistance in Milan during the latter half of the war years. As a filmmaker, he was an acclaimed documentarist. His politics and his aesthetic of social realism made him an obvious choice. Pontecorvo and screenwriter Franco Solinas were approached with the project.

The first screenplay Solinas turned in used the POV of a French paratrooper disgusted with his country’s treatment of the Algerians. It was nixed because the focus on a French protagonist and the backgrounding of the oppression suffered by the poorer citizens of Algiers, those living in near-poverty in the Casbah, and their treatment as little more than serfs by the colonials. Yacef prepared his own script, which was rejected by the production company as heavily skewed towards the Algerians. The final screenplay by Pontecorvo and Solinas, while making no bones about colonialist arrogance and brutality, also depicted the FLN’s initial fight back in unambiguous terms: the French police officers shot in the back, the bombing campaigns, the drive-by shootings. Innocent victims on both sides. ‘The Battle of Algiers’, for a goodly part of its running time, is a film about terrorism. It was used as a training film by both the Black Panthers and the Provisional IRA.

It’s a dangerous and provocative film, made more so by the immediacy of Pontecorvo’s directorial approach. Using grainy film stock, guerrilla-style on-the-street cinematography and jumpy edits, ‘The Battle of Algiers’ deliberately emulated the style of the newsreels of the new day. To emphasize the sense of documentary realism, Pontecorvo used non-professional actors (for many of whom it was there one and only time before the camera) with only the character of Le Colonel Matthieu, a composite of several French counter-insurgency officers, played by an established performer (Jean Martin). Yacef himself appeared in the film, portraying another composite character, Djafar, but essentially playing a version of himself.

Such as the film can be said to centre on a protagonist (the focus shifts around the halfway mark from the FLN’s activities to the intervention of the French military in the form of the 10th Parachute Regiment), that man is Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag), an illiterate but righteously indignant street hustler who becomes involved with the FLN after his release from prison for decking a white man while standing up for himself. But Pontecorvo meticulously documents the contribution of other members: men, women and children. Then, as mentioned, the focus shifts to Matthieu and his troops as they police Algiers, stage incursions into the Casbah, interrogate suspects (a montage of beatings, electrocution, improper use of blowtorches, and forced submersion in vats of water is a pre-Guantanamo Bay blueprint for man’s inhumanity to man), and try to break the insurgents’ chain of command.

The characterization of Matthieu makes an interesting counterpoint to the ruthless but dedicated mindset of la Pointe and his comrades. Matthieu is a basically a man doing his job, doing it by whatever means are available to him, but not taking any personal pleasure in what he has to do. At a press conference, he responds to the accusation of using fascist measures by reminding the journalists that he was a member of the Resistance and that some of his men are survivors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. When someone quotes Sartre’s opposition to colonialism, he ruefully wonders, “Why do the Sartres of this world always support the other side?”

It’s almost tempting to describe Pontecorvo’s direction as “neutral” or “even-handed”, but the film’s coda finds him definitely on the side of the people. Nonetheless, it’s his focus and commitment to realism that make ‘The Battle of Algiers’ such a timeless and powerful work of cinema: his ability to document a decisive political and social moment without the weight of history and the responsibility of the artist overwhelming the project.

(Footnote: there’s a great review, over at Mondo 70, of the other film about the Battle of Algiers, Mark Robson’s ‘Lost Command’)

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Herr Herzog and Ms McGowan

Joint birthday greetings to Werner Herzog …

… for whom the words “maverick” and “genius” might well have been invented;

and to Rose McGowan …

… for whom the phrase “enough to make a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window” almost certainly was invented.

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GIALLO SUNDAY: Knife of Ice

Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 giallo is an exercise in slow-burn and sleight of hand. Opening with some graphic (and most likely unfaked) bullfighting footage, Lenzi follows the opening credits with this quote: “Fear is a knife of ice which penetrates the senses down to the depth of conscience,” attributed to Edgar Allan Poe. The scene switches immediately to a railway station where Martha Caldwell (Carroll Baker) flinches every time a train passes.



We discover, in short order, that Martha is mute, the cause of her affliction was witnessing the death of her parents in a derailment at a young age, and that she is at the station to meet her cousin Jenny (Ida Galli, appearing under her Evelyn Stewart pseudonym), a soprano just back from a tour. Her physician, Dr Laurent (Alan Scott), is delighted at this positive step and still holds out hope of Martha regaining her voice.



Martha and Jenny are driven back to their uncle Ralph (George Rigaud)’s villa, an idyllic place except for the fact that it overlooks a cemetery. Their driver is the shifty and monosyllabic Marcos (Eduardo Fajardo). Ralph’s other staff are housekeeper Annie Britten (Silvia Monelli) and maid Rosalie (Olga Gherardi). At the villa, prior to a birthday party for the pre-pubescent Christina (Maria-Rosa Rodriguez), the daughter of a friend of the family, Jenny gives Ralph a gift of some books on the occult, a subject of which he seems to have specialist knowledge.





Lenzi takes his time establishing the protagonists and their interrelationships. Almost the first half hour is given over to character study: Martha’s troubled state of mind, her therapeutic love of painting and her friendship with Christina; Jenny’s relationship with Martha (Jenny features prominently in Martha’s recurring flashbacks to the bullfight depicted in the opening scene); Ralph’s interest in the esoteric, his heart condition and his dependence on medication; Dr Laurent’s omnipresence in the household (is he being overly solicitous to Martha, or is there an ulterior motive?); and the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’-style goings on amongst the staff.



Just when you’d be forgiven for wondering what anything has to do with anything, the first murder occurs. And while ‘Knife of Ice’ certainly plays on the accepted iconography …





… it unfolds in notably bloodless fashion. For anyone who knows Lenzi solely by reputation – i.e. as the purveyor of such violent fare as ‘Almost Human’, ‘Cannibal Ferox’ and ‘Eaten Alive’ – ‘Knife of Ice’ will come as an eye-opener, with as much attention paid to characterization and pacing as there is to the elegant widescreen cinematography, and with a wordless central performance that must rank as Carroll Baker’s best.



The staid pacing is pepped up by some excellent set-pieces, including two fog-bound scenes that Lenzi milks for optimum tension. The lacunae necessary for the final act revelation are niftily scattered throughout the narrative. The eagle-eyed and congenitally suspicious will probably twig who the killer is, but the big reveal comes at the end of a cat-and-mouse sequence that only serves to sow further doubts.





Three corpses in, Inspector Duran (Franco Fantasia) assumes protagonist duties. Not your average giallo cop (i.e. he’s actually competent), Duran’s presence galvanizes the second half of the film, and the manhunt that ensues when the suspicion shifts to a drug-addicted Satanist sees the cemetery location used to excellent effect. But this digression – and it’s hardly a spoiler to say so – leads to a “wrong man” switcheroo comparable to that of ‘The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh’ and suddenly Martha finds herself again at risk.



‘Knife of Ice’ demands patience in its early stretches, but plays fair with its lacunae, and sprinkles in enough clues (however elusively) to justify its final act rug-pull. It’s not quite as stylish or baroque as many gialli, but it’s quietly compelling and confidently directed.

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The polls are open

September, and the last month of Summer of Satan. October will see the return of 13 for Halloween, while the Second Annual Winter of Discontent will kick off sometime in November. In other words, that’s my viewing choices for the remainder of 2011 roundly influenced. (Although there will be the odd classic of world cinema slipping under the net: stay tuned for a review of a certain 1966 Pontecorvo film in the next few days.)

Already, my mind turns to next year and a theme for the summer months on The Agitation of the Mind. In time-honoured tradition, I’m throwing it open to you guys. The sidebar poll has gone up, voting will remain open till the end of the year. Your choices are:

1. Summer of sci-fi. The runner up in last year’s poll, giving Summer of Satan enough competition that I thought it was worth giving it a second chance.

2. Video nasties. At one time or another, there were 72 films on the DPP’s hit list, with 39 prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. The majority of them are now commercially available uncut. The others you have to look a bit harder for. I’ve already reviewed a couple of titles, and I’m not setting myself the stupid task of wading through the whole lot, but if this one wins, say a representative sample of a dozen?

3. Director retrospective. Sam Peckinpah, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Fabrice du Welz have all received the retrospective treatment on Agitation. If you vote for this one, feel free to hit up the comments box and suggest a director.

4. Ten films that changed the world. In-depth articles about ten films that had a far-reaching effect beyond cinema and can genuinely be said to have made a definitive social, artistic or political change. For anyone who despairs of my predilection for exploitation films, vote for this and encourage me to raise my game.

5. Cinema as a second language. A retrospective of films directed by artists for whom cinema was not their primary medium. The author as auteur; the photographer as purveyor of the moving image; the art terrorist as documentarist. An evaluation of how one discipline informs the other.

Over to you …

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